by Anne Rice
Signore Antonio went quiet. Then spoke again. “I wondered if my old friend would be pleased that you were living under the old roof, if he would be pleased that you were going through his many books. And I even wondered more than once if I might ask you to pray for the soul of that scholar who had lived in the house before.”
“I will pray for him,” Vitale whispered.
Signore Antonio looked directly at Fr. Piero.
“Do you still insist it is a demon raging here, a Jewish dybbuk? Or don’t you see now that it was the ghost of my old friend whose memory I consigned to oblivion because I could not bear his pain or my own?”
The priest did not answer.
Signore Antonio looked at me. I could see that he wanted to tell them of my description of the ghost I’d seen, but he did not. He did not want to indict me for seeing spirits or talking to them. I said nothing.
“Why did I not consider the truth of this in the beginning?” he asked, looking once again at Fr. Piero. “And who now is charged, justly, with seeing to it that my old friend’s remains are at last properly laid to rest?”
We sat in quiet for a long time. Fr. Piero made the Sign of the Cross and murmured a prayer.
Finally Signore Antonio rose to his feet and we all rose with him. “Bring light,” he said to the servants, and we followed him now out of the dining room and down to the main floor.
There he took a candelabrum from Pico, and unbolting the door to the cellar, he led the way down the stairs.
The scene was far worse than it had been only hours ago when I had come to seek the ghost. Every bit of furniture had been broken into pieces both large and small. Every book in sight had been ripped apart. Several of the casks, apparently empty, had been staved in, and broken glass glittered all over the flags.
But there was no unusual sound here. In fact, there was no sound at all except for our own respiration, and the soft steps of Signore Antonio as he approached the very spot where I had seen the ghost take a stand.
Signore Antonio gave the order for the floor to be cleared. At once his servants and guards swept back the debris. Their very boots at once marked the few hollow flags in the floor.
Quickly, with prying fingers, the stones were turned up and over and free of the space beneath them.
And there, in the light of the candelabrum, for all to see, was the small skeleton of the man, a loose chain of bones held together by the rotting remnants of his clothes.
All around him in bundles lay his books. And beside his books his sacks of treasure. But he himself, how he might have suffered in this tiny place, weeping, wounded, untended. The bones made it plain, to the bones of the hand that reached up to clutch the bundle that cradled his head, and the bones that tried to hold forever the precious book beside him.
How small and fragile lay the skull. And how in the light the little spectacles glittered.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THAT AFTERNOON, THE JEWISH ELDERS WERE INVITED to the house. Signore Antonio met with them in private, leaving Niccolò and Vitale and me to ourselves.
A coffin was brought that evening for the remains of Giovanni, and we accompanied the Jewish elders by torchlight on the long trek to the Jewish Cemetery where the remains were laid to rest. All prayers were said as they were meant to be said.
No ruffians were allowed to harry the funeral procession. And it was late when we returned to the quiet house. It was as if the ghost had never been there. The servants were still sweeping the passages and stairways, in spite of the hour, and candles burned in many rooms.
Signore Antonio summoned Vitale to join him in the library, and there told him, as Vitale would tell me later, that Giovanni’s wealth had been divided with one half being given to the Jewish elders, and the other bequeathed to Vitale who would not only pray for the soul of Giovanni, and commemorate his death in every acceptable way, but would begin the collection and restoration of Giovanni’s many literary works. Signore Antonio had copies of many of these books, and Vitale would hunt down those that had been lost. This would be Vitale’s principal task for Signore Antonio for some time to come.
Meanwhile Niccolò would move into the house as had been planned and Vitale would commence work as his secretary again.
In other words, the prayer of Vitale had been answered, and in some ways, so had the prayers he had uttered in the synagogue, in that he was now, thanks to the inheritance from Giovanni, on his way to being a rich man.
I knew my time was coming to a close. In fact, I did not know why Malchiah had not already come for me.
I visited Signore Antonio at his house just as he was heading for bed, and told him that I would soon be leaving, as my job was finished.
He gave me a long and meaningful look. I knew that he wanted to ask me how or why I’d seen Giovanni’s spirit, but he didn’t, as this was a dangerous subject in Rome, and he was disposed, obviously, to let it go. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was that Lodovico had taken his own life. I tried to think of the words, but I couldn’t. Finally, I put out my arms and he drew me close in a firm embrace, and thanked me for all I’d done.
“You know you can remain with us for as long as you like,” he said. “I am delighted to have a lutenist in my house. And I would love to hear all the songs you know. Were I not in mourning for Lodovico, I would beg for you to play something for me now. But the point is, you can remain with us. Why don’t you stay?”
He was completely earnest in this, and for a moment I couldn’t think of an answer. I looked at him. I thought of all that had happened in these two days, and it felt as if I’d known him for years. I felt the same pain I’d experienced in my first mission for Malchiah, when I’d become so very close to the people in England whom I’d been sent to help.
I thought about Liona and Little Toby, and of Malchiah’s assurance to me that I knew how to love. If that was true, it was a recent bit of learning, and I was still a dreadful beginner at loving and would have to somehow make up for ten years of bitterness and failure to love anyone at all. Whatever the case, I loved this man now and I didn’t want to go. Much as I wanted to return to Liona and Toby, I didn’t want to go.
Niccolò was asleep when I came to his room, and I let my farewell be a simple kiss on his forehead. His color had returned, and he was sleeping deeply and well.
When I got back to the “other” house, I found Vitale in the library where we had first talked. He was already reading through some of Giovanni’s translations, and he had a stack of books ready for further examination.
Those volumes that had been in the cellar hiding place were badly damaged from mold and damp, but he could make out well enough the titles and the subject matter, and would seek replacements far and wide. He was now completely taken with the life of Giovanni, and Giovanni’s accomplishments, and he spoke of seeking out others who had been Giovanni’s pupils in years past.
It turned out Pico had told him of our visit to the house in the early hours, and Pico had overheard my conversations with the ghost and my conversation with Signore Antonio in which I had described the ghost in detail. So Vitale knew it all.
He said that if it were not for me surely the Inquisition would have destroyed him, of that he was well aware.
“It was never your doing, any of it,” I reminded him. He sat there shuddering, as if he could not quite get the earlier danger out of his mind.
“But my prayer, my prayer for fame and fortune, do you think it waked this spirit?”
“The opening of the house itself waked the spirit,” I said. “And now the spirit is completely at peace.”
When we embraced, I was close to weeping.
Near midnight, when all slept, I went up to the synagogue, retrieved the lute from the floor where I’d left it, and sat on one of the benches in the darkness wondering what I should do.
The servants had swept the place, cleared away the fallen chandeliers, and dusted things. I could see all this by a bit of light that leaked in from a torch on the ne
arby stairs.
I sat there wondering: Why am I still here? I had said my farewells because I’d felt an overwhelming desire to say them, a certainty that I was meant to say them, but I did not know what to do now.
Finally, I resolved to leave the house.
Only Pico was on guard at the front door. I gave him most of the gold in my pockets. He didn’t want it, but I insisted.
I saved only what I thought I might need to find a warm place in a tavern where I might listen to the music and wait in the hopes that Malchiah would soon come for me, and I felt strongly that he would.
Soon, I was walking, very far away from the part of town I knew, through ink black streets where seldom a dog barked or a hooded figure hurried by. My thoughts were heavy. My failure to save Lodovico weighed on me no matter how many times I reminded myself that the Maker knew the hearts and minds of all of us, and He and He alone could judge the misery or confusion, or poison, that had led Lodovico to his dark path. More than ever I realized that what we know of another soul’s salvation is essentially nothing. We are always thinking and talking about our own souls, and of our own souls we don’t know what the Maker knows.
Nevertheless I marveled that I had not foreseen his suicide. I thought of myself when I was younger, and how many times I’d been tempted to take my own life. There were months, even years, when I was obsessed with the possibility of suicide, times even when I’d planned my own death down to the disposal of my remains. Indeed, every time I’d completed an assassination for The Right Man, skillfully dispatching another soul into the unknown, I’d been so tempted to take my own life that it was a marvel I’d survived. What would my life have amounted to, had I taken that step? I was almost weeping with gratitude suddenly that I’d been given the opportunity to do something, anything, that might be good. Anything, I whispered to myself as I walked along, anything at all that might be good. Vitale and Niccolò were alive and well. And the soul of Giovanni had apparently found rest. If I’d played the smallest part in any of it, I was too grateful for words. So why was I weeping? Why was I so sad? Why did I keep seeing Lodovico, dying with the poison in his mouth? No, this was no perfect victory, far from it.
And then there was Ankanoc, the real dybbuk of this adventure, and his words still echoing in my mind. When and how would I have to deal with Ankanoc from now on? Of course it had been foolish for me to think that I might see angels and not demons, that the one would not presuppose the other, and that some sinister personage would not manage to be more than a negative voice in my head. Yet I hadn’t expected it. No, I hadn’t. And still didn’t know what to make of it. Fact was, I believed in God and always had, but I don’t know if I have ever really believed in the Devil.
I couldn’t get Ankanoc’s face out of my mind, that bittersweet, charming expression. Surely before his fall, he had been an angel as beautiful as Malchiah, or so it seemed. Shocking to think of it, the vast airy firmament with its angels and demons, the world to which I belonged now more surely than any world I’d ever known.
I was growing tired. Why hadn’t Malchiah taken me away? Perhaps because I had my heart set upon one more small experience here, and that was to find a cheery tavern, filled with laughter and light, where there was no lutenist playing at the moment.
At last I came to just such a bright and cheerful place with its door wide open to the night. A fire blazed in a crude cavern of a fireplace, and the rude tables and benches were thronged with men young and old, rich and poor, many with shining oily faces, some with heads bowed, dozing in the shadows, and indeed there were children there asleep on the laps of their fathers, or on bundles of rags on the dusty floor.
When I appeared with my lute, a lusty cry rose from the crowd. Cups were raised in greeting. I bowed, and I made my way towards a corner table where at once two tankards of ale were set down before me.
“Play, play, play,” came the cries from all sides.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. How sweet the wine smelled, how delicious the malt. And how warm was the air, filled with the sounds of talk and laughter. I opened my eyes. Far on the other side of the tavern sat Ankanoc, looking exactly as he had at the Cardinal’s banquet, peering at me, his eyes filled with tears.
I shook my head as if to say no to all he meant to offer, and now to answer him the best way I knew how—with song.
I began to strum and then to play, and within a moment had the place singing with me, though what the song was and how they knew it I could not guess. All the melodies I’d ever heard from this time I could easily now run through and it seemed to me I was happier here in these moments, surrounded by these crude and bold singers, than ever I’d been in all my strange life in this time, and maybe in any other. Ah, what broken creatures we are, and how we endure.
Indeed, deep dark memories came back to me, not of this world, but of the world I’d long ago left as a boy, when I’d stood on the street corner and strummed these old Renaissance songs for the bills people threw at my feet. I felt so sad for that boy, sad for his bitterness, sad for the mistakes he was going to make. I felt sad that he had lived so long with a locked heart and a ruptured conscience, sharpening the bitterness of his life on every cherished memory of pain that he carried in him day in and day out. And then I felt wonder that the seeds of goodness had lain dormant so long in him, waiting for the breath from an angel’s lips.
Ankanoc was gone, though where or how I didn’t know. All around me were convivial faces. People brought down their cups and tankards in time with my playing. I sang some of the old phrases I remembered, but mostly I played to their singing as melodies I’d never heard before came from the lute in my hands.
On and on I played until my soul was full of the warmth and the love around me, full of the light of the fire, and the light of so many faces, full with the sound of the strings of the lute, and the words becoming music, and then it seemed—right in the very middle of my boldest song, my sweetest, boldest most thumping and melodic song, I felt the air change, and the light brighten and I knew, I knew all these greasy shining faces that surrounded me were being transformed into something that was not corporeal at all, but rather notes of music, and it was a music of which I was only the barest part, and the music was rising higher and higher.
“Malchiah, I’m weeping,” I whispered. “I don’t want to leave them.”
A long ribbon of laughter softly broke the darkness that surrounded me, and every syllable of it was picked up as if it were the kernel of a melody, full and entire, and destined now to mingle with another.
“Malchiah,” I whispered.
And I felt his arms around me. I felt him cradling me as he lifted me. The music was made up of space as well as time and it seemed each note was a mouth from which another mouth sprang and then another and another.
He was cradling me as he carried me upward.
“Will I always love them so much? Will I always hate to leave them? Is that part of it, part of what I have to suffer?”
But the word “suffer” was the wrong word because it had all been too grand, too splendid, too golden. And I could hear his lips against my ear reminding me of that, and saying in the softest tones,
“You’ve done well, and now you know there are others waiting for you.”
“This is the school of love,” I said, “and every lesson is deeper, richer, finer.”
I saw a vision of love; I saw that it was no one thing, but a great commingling of things both light and dark and fierce and tender, and my heart broke as the questions broke from my lips.
But no answer came except the anthems of Heaven.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SOMEONE WAS SHAKING ME. I WOKE UP, OUT OF A nightmare. Shmarya stood there in the darkness, his back to the pale light from the window. Nighttime streets below.
“You’ve been asleep for twenty-four hours,” he said. We were in my room in the Mission Inn, and I lay on top of the rumpled comforter, my clothes twisted and moist, my body full of aching
muscles. The room was cold.
The nightmare clung to me—full of all the telltale signs of dreams, the incoherent shifts, the distorted faces, the absurd and incomplete backdrops. It was utterly unlike the clarity of Angel Time.
I tried to hear again the angels singing, but there were only faint echoes, and a fragment of the nightmare rose, to blot them out.
Ankanoc had been arguing with me about the suicide of Lodovico. “According to your system,” he had said over and over, “this poor soul goes into a blazing Hell. But there is no such place. His soul will reincarnate and he will have to learn what he failed to learn the first time.” I’d seen the blazing Hell. I’d heard the screams of the damned. Ankanoc kept laughing. “You think I’m a devil? Why would I want to live in such a place?” Such a mocking smile, and then a wooden expression. “You think you’ve been visited by angels of the Lord? Why would you be in such torment over so many things? If your personal God had forgiven you, if you had in fact turned to Him, wouldn’t the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light? No, you know nothing of Heavenly Spirits. But don’t let that frighten you. Welcome to the Human Race.”
I sat up, bowed my head and prayed. “Lord, deliver me from this.” I was dizzy and terribly thirsty. The sense of having failed, of having let Lodovico slip away into death, was as strong with me as it had been in Rome. And I was angry, angry that Ankanoc had come into my world, into my dreams, into my thoughts.
If your personal God had forgiven you, if you had in fact turned to Him, wouldn’t the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light?
“It’s finished now,” said Shmarya. He had a quiet easy voice, resonant, but youthful, and he was dressed as I was dressed, in a blue cotton shirt and khaki pants.
He helped me off the bed. I went to the window and looked at my watch. It was 2:00 a.m. The streetlamps below gave the only illumination.
Memories of my time in Rome were crowding in, pervading the fragments of nightmare. “Let this dream go away, please!” I whispered.